What do we do now -- An Ada Jensen story
by AdaJensen
Summary: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - female Adam Jensen/Francis Pritchard fanfic. This was a thought experiment inspired by a conversation on gender-swapping characters in stories (rule 63), and a drawing that a friend did of a female character with Jensen-like augments. I was inspired to imagine what an Ada Jensen would be like, and perhaps what kind of relationship she'd have with Frank.
1. Chapter 1

He ran his hands over the synthetic sinew of her arms, fingers lightly exploring its texture. She was lost in thought at the moment as she realized the conformation of shape was different than if she still had skin there, and she began trying to compare the feeling. She was no longer sure she could accurately remember what her natural limbs had felt like, and this occasionally struck her with sudden dysphoria before rationality set the thought aside as moot at this point. This was who she was now. The mind was funny like that, making it difficult to think back to your past and see yourself as physically any different than you are now. Now became your entire identity and reality.

He came to her wrists and slowed considerably, admiring the delicacy and precision of movement in the joints as he took her hands and pressed them to his face. She moved her fingers slightly, carbon fiber structure with the palm-side covered in a slightly pliable self-healing and sensing polymer that could feel detail more finely than was possible for the most sensitive human flesh. This was her first time feeling someone so intimately since she had lost Megan. Her fingers twitched and made almost inaudible whirring sounds as she made only the slightest of movements, fearing to press too hard, but his face looked completely serene. He gazed unwaveringly into her eyes, seeing how her metallic irises reflected the soft evening light that came in through the apartment windows. Her thumb drifted down his face, grazing his lip with the gentlest touch she could manage, and she shivered at how it felt, and at how he opened his mouth in desire, eager to taste her.

Just hours ago she'd accused him of seeing her as an object to fix, something for his tech fascination, and said he'd never respected her. He'd never been interested in her before she became like this. He responded that he'd given her a hard time because he was stubborn and suspicious (they both were), but never doubted her, that his colleagues saw something in her and he trusted that, and grew to respect her enormously. She'd been dating someone before, and then mourning after that, but he still admired her as a colleague then, although he didn't show it well. He had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about how he'd been treated in life as well, and it was hard for him to show affection until he felt like he might never have the chance to again.

Being a bit too honest after a few stiff drinks (she wasn't yet sure how being both an amputee and having a health maintenance system had affected her tolerance, and tended to misjudge), she admitted that she hadn't been sure if she even liked men, but they'd been through so much together, and there was something about him. His skill and expertise, and they both liked tinkering - although he seemed to be working on that damn motorcycle forever and he teased her about taking apart old mechanical things to see how they worked instead of building something relevant to the digital age. Then there was something alluring about his soft, white hands and his cool, graceful touch as he worked on her augments, and his reassuring voice in her ear when she was in the field. Competency and passion were what she had admired most in Megan, too, and the dignified way she carried herself, with her luxurious hair always tied up neatly above her high collar. She saw a similar admirable haughtiness in Frank, and wasn't sure what to make of the connection that her mind had formed.

Jensen had gone to see him in his office one night, retracting her shades and revealing her sad eyes as she asked, "What do we do now that it feels like it's all over?" She stood next to him, noting not for the first time that they were about the same height. "I know how you feel," he said quietly, returning her look. Being met with his smooth voice and compassionate eyes so close to her, she reached out swiftly and impulsively to touch his long hair. Rather than move away, he took her glossy carbon-black hand in his pale human one. She thought about how he was so comfortable with her tech, and if anyone she could trust would be unflinchingly okay with it, it'd be him. She pulled her hand back and slipped her leather coat off onto the table, revealing her armored body beneath, and waiting to see how he'd look at her. How many times had he seen what she'd seen and been right there guiding her through the maddest scenarios? And when she woke up stranded, beaten, and half-naked on that ship, it was his voice that she wanted to hear more than anything. Now, he looked from the coat to her stoic face, for once seeming unsure what to do.

Suddenly feeling like she'd been too forward, she quietly said maybe they should get together and talk at her place sometime, then hastily grabbed her coat and turned away. "Of course," was all he said. She gave him a glance over her shoulder. He was staring at her back, and seemed to lose his breath as he saw her in all her augmented glory right then. The dark stealth armor that was molded to her back and shaped around the metal access ports, how it blended into the pitch-black electroactive polymer musculature of her arm, which he could see twisting with her movement while its gold insets glinted. Her medium faux-hawk was a glossy, deep coffee color in the warm light of his office. She looked at him with one perfect eye, the pure white and metallic yellow-green of it framed by the black anodized titanium where her sapphire lense was sheathed inside her head. He caught the split-second rotation of her eye's aperture as it focused on him in the low light. In that moment, she was terrifying and inhumanly beautiful to him. Then she was gone and he was left standing there for a long time, thinking about what had happened.

He went to see her that Friday, and they drank and talked and let all of their feelings and worries out. They were mostly her worries about how she was seen now, and she couldn't believe he willingly chose to get cognitive enhancements for his job because as a security person she never trusted them, and she dismissed all the people telling her she wasn't prepared for her job unless she had them. Even she and Megan had fought over it, and it turned out that Megan had been right and now here she was, alone and with most of her body that she had taken so much pride in training, gone.

Strangers told her how good she looked now and questioned her about her enhancements and fetishized them. She still felt like she had just woken up from a long nightmare of paralysis and waking surgeries where they asked her questions as they tweaked her body, and the terror that suddenly struck her when she realized she couldn't see and she couldn't feel her arms or legs because they were gone. In the following weeks, she experienced a weird mixture of phantom limb sensations and searing pain as she adjusted to the loss of limbs and the introduction of new ones that worked differently at the same time. There was the feeling of dissociation as she found she had new things she could move with her mind, and she experienced strange mental sensations as she learned to release blades from her arms like twitching a new muscle. Then one day it was scarily like it had been there all along. This was all the stuff she wanted to tell the people who complimented her on how cool she looked while she stared at them through the shades that were now part of her face, and just felt empty. She wanted them to know that having the majority of your body replaced with experimental tactical equipment wasn't the same as going under to get a little cog implant.

Yet at the same time, no matter how bewildering it could be to not remember how your own body used to feel, she liked the power and precision. She could pop a ceramic blade from her forearm and give someone a close shave with it before they could blink, and never spill a drop of blood. She could sense more than most people wanted to know about those around her, and crack rudimentary computer security with her mind. Yes, she had needed this to do what she did. Now it seemed that she was her job, though. What was left of the rest of her? She didn't unwind at the gym after work or spend an evening reading anymore, because there was now no point. She didn't go out drinking with her friends on weekends. She'd been afraid to have sex or even try going on a date. Part of it was the grief, part of it was the shit she'd seen and was afraid she'd see again one day too soon. Part of it was fear of herself.

These were memories and feelings she had only revealed to Frank, because she worried when he confessed attraction that he was one of the fantasizers and didn't know what it was really like. But she knew that he was smarter than that, and she felt sure of his intentions and honesty as he told her about the professional admiration and growing affection as they had worked closely together, as well as being struck with that moment of terrible beauty. The last thought brought on those same mixed feelings as her walk between the freedom of unbridled power and the confusion of alienation from her human identity. She didn't know what could develop from this talk with Frank - or even what she was capable of developing - but touching another person and being looked at this way was what she needed right now. To be appreciated for who she is; not wanted for what she is.

He finally spoke, bringing her slowly back from the spiral of her thoughts. "May I touch your face?"

"Yes." The casual huskiness of her voice thrilled him, and he reached toward her, touching his long white fingers to the scar that bisects her eyebrow, then running them to the titanium inset on the side, and up into her thick hair.

She shuddered as a forgotten sensation ran down her spine. She relaxed her hands to his sides, not wanting to grab him roughly if these feelings become overwhelming, and trying to trust herself that nothing bad will happen. He moved one hand and then the other to trace the rods in her neck down to the t-shirt that covered her clavicle, and he felt a familiar awe at how well she blended tech and flesh. He so rarely saw this much of her, and thinks this may be the first time he's seen her without armor since her transformation. Experimentally, she tightened her hands on his thin hips and pulled him closer, wrapping her arms around him. It didn't seem too tight, as he pressed his face against the side of hers, seeming to revel in her warm mechanical embrace. She closed her eyes in relief and allowed her own enjoyment of their closeness to surface.

"Thank you for being there," she said after a moment, trying to keep the emotion out of her voice.

He pulled back to look at her. "Ada, you were there. For all of us. I never really knew how to thank you for that, if it were possible." Now it was his turn to hold her, trying to communicate to her how precious she was to him through the tightening of his arms. She rested her head on his soft neck, listening to the rapid beating of his human heart.


	2. Chapter 2

Frank awoke to momentary disorientation and his eyes searched for something to focus on, as the first light of dawn was just beginning to become a faint glow that he could see through the open blinds. He felt something warm and solid like plastic or metal that weighed on his chest, and sleepily reached up to try to remember what it was.

He startled himself more awake when he realized it was a hand, and he set up on his elbows, his blood rushing to his head with a surge of adrenaline. He instantly remembered that it was Ada, but still something about the situation had scared him. Aside from the disorientation, his immediate thought was fear of startling _her_. He knew a lot about her, including that her blades had a safety that was automatically engaged when she fell asleep or lost consciousness and that took a moment to disengage upon waking, but he still worried. There had never been a problem with the select few people that had this technology, but when you were dealing with equipment that was one-hundred percent neurologically controlled, it brought into question just how well they could understand and engage that control. How good was anyone at telling when someone was fully conscious, or whether they were having a waking dream? How about sobriety? This is why there was a momentary delay before disengaging safety, despite debates over how efficacious this was for people in combat situations. As a corporation, they had to err on the side of caution for themselves, above all else.

His second thought was that he didn't want to wake her because she used to complain about how difficult it was to sleep without sedatives (which in her case, mostly consisted of heavy liquor). In the dim artificial light of her apartment, he saw the creamy skin of her uncovered back and how it blended with the soft white of the bed sheets, the silver and pink lines of her scars, and the contrast of the metallic holes in the skin above her shoulder-blades, her espresso-colored hair, and the mixture of matte and glossy black on the arm that was draped over him. Her face was turned away from him, buried in the single pillow that she had, perhaps as a testament to her determination to be alone. He'd fallen asleep on the wadded-up red duvet.

He wanted to touch the smooth skin of her back again to remind himself of how good it was to feel it for the first time last night, like listening to a snippet of a favorite song and getting back that feeling of how it felt the first time you heard it. He was so used to seeing her fully-dressed, her augments and armor hidden under her overcoat. It was amazing, jarring, and somehow like a wonderful dream to see her body underneath, and to feel how human she still was at the core. Last night, her hard hands had gripped his shoulders, pulling him onto the bed, on top of her. Her breath was soft and controlled and smelled like warm whisky. He ran his hands over her abs, down her hairless body, and felt how hot and soft and wet she was inside. So different from the hard and rubbery synthetic muscles and robotic joints of her legs that were pulling him against her, and the hands that slid smoothly over his thin chest and waist.

Later, he stared up at her dark beauty as she held him down, gripping his bony wrists as tightly as he could bear, and he saw the aggressiveness of her eyes as she stared down at him. He imagined what she'd be like if that look turned murderous and she suddenly unsheathed her blades on him with her lightning-quick reflexes, plunging the nanoceramic swords into his chest before he could even flinch. He shivered and felt his arousal growing. He caught this thought and chastised himself for it. She _had actually killed people_, and here he was, fetishizing it. He felt dazed and overwhelmed as she bore down on him with the inhuman strength of her limbs in her moment of intoxicated ecstasy, but her softer torso looked fragile and porcelain white in the faint artificial light of her room.

In the dim morning light, he gently took her hand as he slid out from under it, and slid off the platform bed, getting the feeling back in his legs as he stood. He wandered to her kitchen and flipped on the warm LED lights so he could check out the stock. Milk and beer and jars of protein supplements in the fridge. Boxes of protein bars and cereal scattered around the shelves. That was it. He sighed. He knew she had to eat a high-protein diet because it was literally converted directly into energy for her batteries, but this was silly. He took a moment to fix his hair while he considered what to do.

"There's some instant coffee in the freezer," she suddenly said from a few feet away from him, giving him a start for the second time that morning. He quickly turned to face her, and found her standing just outside the kitchen, wearing only her black boy shorts. She raised her eyebrows at him after a moment of his staring. "What? You're shirtless, too, and it's my apartment."

"No, you just…" he decided not to say _scared me_ as she turned and walked away, knowing that it might be taken the wrong way. "Um, do you want some coffee, Jensen?" he called her that out of habit, and wished he could take it back. "Or how about we go out, find a diner?"

"I don't like to go out," she called back. _Oh, right_, he recalled. She seemed to sometimes have symptoms of - agoraphobia? He wasn't sure. But she avoided unnecessary time out in public. Fear of attack, aggravation with how she stood out and there wasn't much she could do about it (how could she hide her augmented hands and face without the disguise looking equally out of place?), social anxiety over how people approached her with comments or questions that were none of their business, or anti-augmentation freaks who just plain singled her out for a challenge. Also, he had to remind himself, some parts of the city looked practically post-apocalyptic at the moment, and he couldn't really blame anyone for wanting to avoid that. There was no questioning that she'd always been brave, even before she had the equipment to back it up. It's how she ended up like she is - because of the kind of stupidity that made her stand up against three mercenary cyborgs who had a few million dollars of work on her, rather than try to run the other direction like any more reasonable natural would've done. Sometimes, though, things just got to her and she spent long swathes of time wanting to be alone.

He stepped out of the kitchen in time to see her about to disappear into the bathroom. "I understand; I'm feeling a little sore, too!" he hastily joked. She stopped and gave him a cold stare, then pointedly turned and went on. He instantly felt mortified. _Oh, god, that probably was a touchy subject, too_, he realized as he remembered how she had a hard time relaxing into trusting herself to touch him, yesterday. _This is going to be difficult_. The realization was finally fully hitting him. He took a deep breath and drew up the courage to follow her.

So he hadn't just tiredly imagined it the night before. There was a total absence of mirrors in her apartment, including the bathroom, which instead included an angry note for the apartment maintenance crew explaining the "accidental" destruction of the vanity, and asking that they hurry up and replace it. He stood silently mulling over this fact as she stepped into the shower, then glanced out at him. "Well? Did you want to join?"

He found himself under the hot water a moment later, with her smooth and soapy hands gently exploring him once again. He watched how the water flowed over her body, his excitement building. Her fingers drifted over his thin hips, and then tenuously on to his erection. He closed his eyes and inhaled sharply as he felt her grip him lightly, testing. "Is that okay?" she whispered in his ear, over the sound of the falling water. He nodded, feeling like he couldn't contain himself enough to respond verbally. This felt dangerous and unbelievably good at the same time, and he throbbed at the thought of those hands on him. Again, his mind drifted to thinking of how she could break every bone in his body with just her hands, and they felt like nothing else he'd known before, and he imagined her hands on his neck and he came hard at the thought of it all. Why was he suddenly thinking things like this?

Shaky and breathing hard and feeling weakened, he soaped her up and kneaded her flesh afterwards. He wasn't sure how much stimulation she liked - or could feel - on her synthetic arms and legs, but he experimented with it anyway, alternating between rough and soft touch on the various textures. She closed her eyes, kept her face under the water to conceal that this degree of attention was making her a little emotional, and in response to his questioning, only told him that it all felt good. And it did, after what seemed like months and months of only receiving gentle touching from physical therapists, it at all, on her skin that was normally kept under armor. He brushed his lips over her neck, including the metal rods that were part of the support structure linking her new arms to her spine. She finished showering and stepped out, soon followed by him. She hurriedly toweled off her hair and abdomen; water didn't seem to stick to her augments. He liked how sleek she looked with her hair darkened and slicked back with water, and realized he was staring again when her shining yellow-green eyes met his.

She threw on her underwear and went to sit hunched on the edge of the bed, staring up at the loft windows. He dressed and went to her, silently sitting on the floor at her feet. He looked at the lines of her legs, how the light-absorbing black cords of her synthetic thigh muscles attached just below her pale hips and ran down into her robotic knee joints, and below that were the perfect curves of her carbon-fiber shins and the high arches of her feet. He'd never seen her original legs, but he imagined that the shape must have been similar, because augments like this were as tailored to the individual as they could make them. He knew that she'd never wear anything but pants and boots in public, but he also imagined how amazing she'd look in shorts with a strip of flesh showing, choosing to keep her legs and feet bare like many women and men with augmented legs did. American society had accepted that it was okay to show more skin in public, only when some people had less of it show. How strange that being pantsless wasn't considered provocative (just showy) when you had a cybernetic lower-half.

Finally, she lowered her eyes to look at him. "I still dream about Megan all the time," her voice was soft, strained. "She comes back, but I miss her and she leaves for some silly reason. Like, her house is gone and she can't get into work because of picket lines, and she doesn't know where I live, and she can't find anywhere to stay. I see her getting on the train and try to stop her, and she doesn't recognize me, thinks I'm some random aug trying to attack her, because she thinks, _Ada would never look like that_. Ada, who said she'd rather die than come back like that." She takes a moment to swallow, and shakes her head. "Dreams are stupid like that," she turns her eyes upward and pauses for a moment.

"I do blame myself for losing her both times, though. I was so unreasonably angry with her, when we found her. I don't know what I expected. Of course she was alive for a reason, and they were using her talent. Of course she wasn't constantly trying to escape and angry at the people holding her, after being there for over six months. But she thought I was one of them, and she sounded friendly, and then she was shocked when she realized it was me. Her voice turned all pitying, like, _Oh Ada, I'm so sorry this happened to you_. When the only thing that helped me through recovery was knowing that I'd find the people who took her, because I thought she was dead, all over some corporate fight. It was like she didn't expect me, like she didn't want me there, or maybe she knew what was about to happen to everyone like me. And she lied to me about her research on me. My fuse is so much shorter than it used to be, and I think, _if only I didn't get so angry_, maybe she wouldn't have disappeared again. I know that's completely irrational, that they got to her after she came back, and threatened her somehow, or made her a deal she _couldn't_ refuse. And they stole my tissue samples. I know all that happened, and there's probably _nothing_ I could've ever done, but I still think, I should've stayed with her when we found her. I should've forgotten everything and everyone else, and just taken her home. To what, I don't know, but I could keep her safe if we were together, right? Or at least I'd have some idea of where she went. That's what my feelings tell me. That's what I think, when you tell me how grateful you are that I made the other choice, and tried to save augmented lives instead, people that were dying because she didn't just kill herself or something when they took her, and she helped them instead. And maybe I did that _because_ I was so angry at her, and not because it was the greater good. I can't even tell you for sure what was going through my mind. I just acted, doing what seemed right in that moment."

Everything spilled out of her, all the things she couldn't tell any therapist, in the light of dawn in her apartment. Frank stared at her silently, and took her hand after a moment. "I'll still always be grateful," is all he said. _Above all else, I'm grateful that you're still here_, is what he thought. After a long moment, she pulled away and dressed, putting on the same things she always wore to work now. He sat looking out the window until she was finished, then he stepped up to her, gently touching her coat sleeve. "Come to my place tonight."

She turned her head to look at him, a hint of a grin on her face as she tried to lighten her mood. "What? You have a place outside your office? Then why don't you keep all your old junk there?" She started toward the door, stopping to grab some protein bars to put in her pockets. Eating seemed like such a chore to her, anymore.

"Because I want my place to be nice!" he retorted. "And it is. I'd like to show you a good time." She raised an eyebrow at him, above the frames set around her eyes, giving him a look like, _What, are you insulting my masterpiece of bachelorette living here? _He returned the stare, challenging her to say what she wanted about how she thought he didn't have a life outside of work, either.

"A good time, huh?" She rolled her eyes better than any natural could, and opened the door, silently accompanying him outside her building. He said a warm goodbye and she nodded to him, before putting up her lenses and starting the trek to work. It was going to be a long day for security, as protests and lay-offs continued.


End file.
